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With the concept of strategic bombing being a moot point, replaced by unmanned guided missiles and our moral unwillingness to strike at population centers, the only real purpose of the Air Force is close-air-support. Even air superiority is, really, an adjunct to that role, in that it protects the troops on the ground against enemy ground-attack aircraft and provides cover for our ground attack aircraft.

Seeing, arguably, the most effective warplane of the last fifty years scrapped for an overpriced, ineffective boondoggle is sickening.

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No, that's not true.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_air_campaign http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_bombing_of_Yugoslavia

There are still valid strategic targets that are well outside of the role of close air support, including command centers, AAA/SAM sites, military bases, manufacturing facilities, bridges, roads, and communications facilities.

What I don't understand is why the various services care so much about what the other services do or don't do. Why does the AF insist on managing the A-10 when they clearly do not and never have wanted it? The Army wants it, let them have it. We're obviously not that concerned with duplication or waste given how much money we've spent on this and the F-22 for, apparently, no gain.

The services guard their missions jealously. They don't want competition within their various roles -- those roles are their justifications for budget, status and involvement.

There are good reasons for specialization, of course. But the institutional politics can't be ignored.

I've heard that the Marines actually have really good air support, because they have their own planes and the generals make damn sure those pilots put the bombs where the grunts need them. I doubt the Air Force likes that. But the Marines are part of the Navy, and the folks running the Navy aren't interested in ground combat. They've already got an air role, on the carriers, and a strategic bombing role, in the missile subs, so they aren't likely to encroach much on the Air Force. Since the Navy puts a cap on how far the Marines' mission would grow, the other services can live with the Marines mixing things up a bit.

It also helps that the Marines have a PR operation unlike anything anywhere on the planet.

And they might be a natural home for the A-10, right? But you can't fly an A-10 off a carrier.

So get rid of the USAF / fold it back into the Army, this way the Navy has an air wing, and the Army has an air wing. Large sky battles are unlikely to happen ever again... the USAF was designed to deal with those, right around when they had become obsolete. Hooray for Parkinson's laws.

The A-10 is a magnificent brute of a plane and does exactly the job it was designed to do, very well... so of course they want to mothball it.

I wonder how hard it would be to make it carrierable, or how hard it would be to string a bunch of barges together to make a floating airfield for it (and use a standard carrier for mechanical support).

The A10's minigun is ineffective at killing modern main-battle tanks, so I wouldn't say it's a raging sucess. In addition, it would certainly be blown up immediately if it came within shooting distance of a tank by any number of man-portable anti-air missiles.

What it can do is provide reasonable close air support against Toyota pickups and infantry, but replacement parts for the plane or the molds to create them don't exist. The A10's titanium airframe will soon need wholesale replacement as it reaches its fatigue limit, so the entire plane would need to be remanufactured.

A drone-based replacement would be far more cost efficient. I don't see why mothballing the A10 is a poor decision.

"I don't see why mothballing the A10 is a poor decision"

Because we do not have any aircraft that can stay on station above our troops stuck out in the middle of nowhere and keep them safe by shooting for multiple hours. Every other aircraft (drone include) is a drop-a-few-and-leave. That is not good enough.

Where have we faced modern main-battle tanks?

We should remove close air support from the Air Force's mission and give it back to the Army.

I thought the AC-130 was pretty good at that. It's even worse at not getting shot down of course but could provide fire support for just as long and over a wider area.

I haven't heard of an AC-130 doing it, but the folks that I talk to mention the A-10 often. More of a sharp shooter thing instead of an area effect thing.

> The A10's minigun is ineffective at killing modern main-battle tanks, so I wouldn't say it's a raging sucess.

I love those improvised battle tanks by the guerrilas that the US has been encountering in their last 30 years of wars.

Yeah good thing no one we're dropping bombs on today has any armored vehicles.

http://defensetech.org/2015/01/07/us-airstrikes-agaisnt-isis...

You make it sound like the A-10 doing close-support is the only way the US has to destroy a tank from the air.

US also don't have boots on the ground. And it's not as if ISIS has the vaguest idea how to use what it has.

Yes that's right there's no one over there right now and that hardware is a black box impervious to anyone figuring out how to use it.

http://www.stripes.com/news/us/1-000-soldiers-from-the-82nd-...

> What it can do is provide reasonable close air support against Toyota pickups and infantry

So can helicopters, drones, and Harriers.

No actually they can't. Well maybe Harriers but helicoptors are vulnerable because they enemy has manpads and drones have too much lag for close air support.

As far as I can tell from this list[1], five A-10s have ever been shot down, while destroying at least 1500 battle tanks and AFVs[2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_combat_losses_of_United... [2] http://www.2951clss-gulfwar.com/statistics.htm

Wow. This is the equivalent of three Rudels

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Ulrich_Rudel

Ironically some input from Rudel was apparently used during the development of the A-10. At least this is mentioned on the Wikipedia page linked above.

>The A10's minigun is ineffective at killing modern main-battle tanks, so I wouldn't say it's a raging sucess.

Heh heh. No. There isn't a tank in the world that can survive an attack from the GAU-8. And it's not a "minigun". A minigun is, you know, small.

The A-10 also can carry a variety of missiles and bombs to get the job done.

I don't necessarily disagree with your conclusion, though. Sniper pods have made "low and slow" unnecessarily risky.

> "The A10's minigun is ineffective at killing modern main-battle tanks"

This is the most ignorant comment in this entire thread. Please go read about the A10's gun -- the GAU-8/A. There is no mobile armor in the world that can withstand even short bursts of fire from it.

Prove this statement. Given that the A-10 shoots from above, that's where the armor's thinner. DU penetrators do a fair bit of damage, independent of the rumoured radioactive burst upon compression. Couple of rounds in the engine probably turn the tank into a bunker.

I wonder what a drone built on the same philosophy as the A-10 ("We built the most awesome machine gun ever, let's strap a plane to it") would look like.

Minigun? Have you seen the size of the shell fired by the GAU-8? It's designed to shoot through the top of the tank, either the turret, or the engine. Quite easy to do, even against modern tanks. Now whether it can do so against modern air defenses is to be determined.

And the primary anti-tank weapon of the A-10 isn't its gun, but the Maverick missile.

In addition, it would certainly be blown up immediately if it came within shooting distance of a tank by any number of man-portable anti-air missiles.

Why do man-portable anti-air missiles only exist near tanks?

The real trouble with the A-10 is that it cannot fit modernized avionics. What needs to happen is a redesign of the A-10 airframe with modern maintenance characteristics.

Instead we got this obsession with multi-role nonsense that led to the F-35 ball of crap over both an A-10 successor and the F-22!

They were designed for strategic bombing, which was certainly a compelling mission during the Cold War.

I think it still is. Sure, there is less nuclear tension. But the idea was always to ensure that no general, no matter how drunk, could imagine actually succeeding with a first strike. That's still the right posture.

If anything, I'd worry that some Russian might think _we_ might successfully launch first, and so jump the gun in a "use them or lose them" decision. MAD only really works when _both_ sides are demonstrably convinced they can't strike first.

Also: I bet the A-10 too underpowered for carrier launch. It's designed to loiter, not dogfight -- it probably doesn't have the acceleration to lift from a carrier deck.

> I've heard that the Marines actually have really good air support, because they have their own planes

Why can't the army buy the same planes, are they not being manufactured any more?

The key west agreement: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_West_Agreement

The army isn't allowed to have fixed wing aircraft with combat capabilities.

Pilots are the hard problem. It's really hard to train them, and to incentivize people to manage them. The Marines can piggy-back on the Navy's aviation personnel infrastructure.

And again, the Marines are capped on scope creep by their placement in the Navy. The Army isn't, so if they got planes that would be much scarier for the Air Force than the Marines.

The Marines use the F/A-18 Hornet and, for close air support in particular, the AV-8B Harrier. Both are slated for replacement by F-35 variants.

They also fly the AH-1 Cobra, which the Army already replaced with the Apache.

Is the Cobra still in service? I had no idea.

Yes, with the Marine Corps, as well as Taiwan, Turkey, and Iran: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_AH-1_SuperCobra#Operators

The Army wants it, let them have it.

Part of the problem is that, maybe because the acquisition process is so absurdly long, the concepts and ideology guiding policy for this thing is from the 1990s. This plane is designed for what we thought war would be like in 2025 back in 1996 or something. Even beyond the terrible $1.4T cost of this thing, I worried it's designed for the entirely wrong concept of warfare going forward. So yeah, maybe bringing the entire CAS mission into the realm of the Army would be a good idea - but even then, how much of that future demand for CAS can be satisfied by Drones for much lower cost and risk? That's the real issue, I think, because it would precipitate sort of an existential crisis for the Air Force.

The USAF has dominion over all fixed wing planes - it's written into how the US Military is organised.

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